Moral Decadence, Goop, and the Packing of a Suitcase

I try to vary my podcast listening between the serious minded, the edifying, and the light and fluffy. It’s not all The Art of Manliness and James White Debates. To cleanse the palate I flip back and forth between Bon Appétit and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, with very small tastes of the Minimalists because, oh my word, I can’t take the moralizing tone for more than ten minutes at a time.

I have so much to say about the New Moral Minimalism–it really is impossible for me to concentrate my already scattered mind to properly untangle All the things that irritate me. That’s one reason why I write about it so rarely, relatively speaking, even though I think about it all the time.

Last week I listened to the Minimalists give travel and packing advice. I have traveling very much roiling up my consciousness because we will shortly be taking our long summer holiday (I will not give in to the spirit of the age and call it a vacation because that can be shortened to vacay and if I thought I was going on something so unpleasant as a vacay I wouldn’t go). I have to shove eight people’s things into a capacious and comfortable minivan and also clean the house so that we won’t die when we come back. There is the question of bags, of suitcases, of days’ worth of clothes, of books, of food stuffs. Really, there are All The Questions compressed into the narrowness of my mind and the single space in our car that can hold all the things we think we need for a whole month.

So I listened to their advice, and how they came to sell everything and move to Montana where they happily live with nothing but a small rickety table, good coffee, and a view. They considered the questions of people who wanted to know what kind of suitcase will be traveling with them on their upcoming tour, and how to fit everything one owns into a single car for a life changing move, and how to go to Europe for a year with just one suitcase. These are all good questions, really, except for having to know about the brand of suitcase.

The irony of this portion of the podcast knocked me back against my cluttered and not perfectly clean kitchen sink. The point of minimalism, as far as I understand it, is not to concentrate so much on Stuff. So two wavy haired young men discovered they could make a fortune talking to people about their Stuff. And the traveling bag in particular–it’s brand, it’s shape, it’s moral virtue because it’s made of sustainable materials and when you buy one a portion of the profit probably goes to the pooooor–this bag that will attend them as they travel around telling other people what to do with their stuff in order not to be controlled by their stuff, merited a seven minute conversation. I dunno. Maybe that’s not the definition of irony. Maybe it’s just plum funny.

I get it, you have to think about your stuff in a concentrating way in order to not be forced to think about your stuff at all other moments. Certainly, if I don’t think about my stuff, all my stuff will rise up to devour me. But this plain basic fact has become another way of virtue signaling. In order to be a good person, you must not have Too Much Stuff, and you must also have The Right Kind of Stuff.

Anyway, this leads me to goop, tee hee. I listened to Bon Appétit interview Gwyneth Paltrow a few weeks ago, because she has some cookbooks out and a lifestyle brand, don’t you know. She does movies now in so far as they will enable her to promote her brand, which is her Life’s Work. I’m sure the word passion was thrown in there somewhere. It’s ok to pause and chuckle, really. Because who among us isn’t longing to know how Gwyneth Paltrow desires us to live. I’ll give you the short answer–expensively. I don’t usually read Slate, but when I do, it’s because they are brilliantly right and Oh My Word That’s So Nuts. (Weird Sex You Didn’t Want To Know About Warning, also How Inappropriate.)

Goop, as far as I can tell, is the opposite of Moral Minimalism. It’s Moral Consumption. I was going to say immoral but that is confusing to the spirit of the age, who is practically leaning over my shoulder tsking me. The outdated objective standard of moral virtue, like, hmmm, I guess I can’t think of anything that would go in that category any more, isn’t applicable to something like goop.

As I listened to Ms. Paltrow talking about cooking, I was confirmed in my belief that food culture is the last place where objective standards have any usefulness any more. What you eat and how you cook it can be talked about with an objectivity that isn’t to be found in any other realm, even the morality of Stuff. You can break the rules a little, whatever the rules are, as long as you nod to those rules and give proper reasons. So when you make a choice between butter and olive oil, you have to defend your reasoning, because some things require butter and the use of olive oil instead is a Terribly Big Deal.

There’s no way to tie this up neatly with a Jesus Bow. The catastrophe of gender fluidity being imposed on the children of America, jumbled against the moral morass of the substance of the human person, who cannot be spoken about except to be affirmed in a disordered confusion, lined up against a pharisaical material moral decadence depresses me not a little. You can’t say that the stuff isn’t important but then spend seven minutes in consideration of the bag, and then fill that bag with ostentatiously priced goop baubles and not collapse under the weight of contradiction. The stress and strain of this foolishness is too much. And now I will go pack, but not in one bag only. Rather, I will be filling many inexpensive bags. You can judge me all along the way. Pip pip.